When Software Attacks!

Unblocking a stuck Lab Manager Environment (the hard way)

This is a post so I don’t forget how I fixed access to one of our environments yesterday, and hopefully it will be useful to some of you. We have a good many pretty complex environments deployed to our lab hyper-V servers, controlled by Lab manager. Operations such as starting, stopping or repairing those environments can take a long, long time, but this time we had one that was quite definitely stuck.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Thursday, March 17, 2016

Net Writer: A great UWP blog editor

I came across Net Writer some months ago, when it’s creator, Ed Anderson blogged about how he’d taken the newly-released Open Live Writer code and used it in his just-started Universal Windows Platform (UWP) app for Windows 10. In January it only supported blogger accounts, which meant that I was unable to use it. However, I checked again this weekend and discovered that it now supports a wide range of blog software including BlogEngine.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Sunday, March 13, 2016

My Resource Templates from demos are now on GitHub

I’ve had a number of people ask me if I can share the templates I use in my Resource Template sessions at conferences. It’s taken me a while to find the time, but I have created a repo on GitHub and there is a new Visual Studio solution and deployment project with my code. One very nice feature that this has enabled me to provide is the same ‘Deploy to Azure’ button as you’ll find in the Azure Quickstart Templates.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Friday, February 26, 2016

Installing Windows 10 RSAT Tools on EN-GB Media-Installed Systems

This post is an aide memoir so I don’t have to suffer the same annoyance and frustration at what should be an easy task. I’ve now switched to my Surface Pro 3 as my only system, thanks to the lovely new Pro 4 Type Cover and Surface Dock. That meant that I needed the Remote Server Administration Tools installing. Doing that turned out to be much more of an odyssey that it should have been and I’m writing this in the hope that it will allow others to quickly find the information I struggled to.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Friday, November 13, 2015

Convert new VM’s dynamic IP address to static with Azure Resource Templates

Over the past few posts on this blog I’ve been documenting the templates I have been working on for Black Marble. In a previous sequence I showed how you can use nested deployments to keep your templates simple and still push out complex environments. The problem with those examples is that they are very fixed in what they do. The templates create a number of virtual machines on a virtual network, with static IP addresses for each machine.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Sunday, November 1, 2015